I love reading them, so now I’m joining the #SundaySentence party started by David Abrams over at the Quivering Pen and on Twitter. It’s not a review. It’s not a story. It’s just one sentence I read this week, presented “out of context and without commentary.” This week’s Sunday Sentences (could not pick just one) are from Jason Brown’s collection, Why The Devil Chose … Read More
Sunday Sentence: God Bless America by Steve Almond
I love reading them, so now I’m joining the #SundaySentence party started by David Abrams over at the Quivering Pen and on Twitter. It’s not a review. It’s not a story. It’s just one sentence I read this week, presented “out of context and without commentary.” This week’s Sunday Sentence: “It was true, like most things his father said, which made … Read More
Veterans, Civilians: Connecting With Stories
Nine years ago, I joined over eight hundred others in Encinitas, California and listened to three veterans tell stories about their time at war. They read their contributions to the anthology, Operation Homecoming, a collection of emails, journals, correspondence, essays and fiction written by those who were were deployed and their families. Almost everyone there seemed to have … Read More
Fixing to Walk. Care to Come Along?
“But the beauty is in the walking — we are betrayed by destinations.” ― Gwyn Thomas A palm reader once told me I was one of those people who didn’t need to travel to learn about life. I was one of those people, she said, who understood that all life contains could be encountered in her own backyard. This is a … Read More
Real Food For Thought
Max Watman’s new book brought me back to fifth grade when my friend Debbie gave me half her chicken sandwich and I found a vein in it. “What’s this?” I asked her when I saw the tiny purple tube protruding from the chicken meat nestled between two pieces of her mother’s homemade bread. She shook her head even though she … Read More
When I Die, I Want to Become a Tomato
When I die, I want to be composted. I’d like to come back as a tomato. When I tell my family this, they just sniff and look somewhere past my shoulder, as if I’ve just farted. If they picture it all, they envision a long process, maggots, turning my body with a shovel, watching me swell and liquify and, of … Read More
Revisions
Revisions: a promising word that grows out of a hopeful thought: to see again. I’ve spent the better part of the past six weeks revising pages I’d “finished” two or three times already. More than once, I have gone still before my computer screen and thanked Allison Hunter who asked me to look again; to see them anew. Those pages … Read More
My Writing Process Blog Tour
Just when I was trying to come up with a blog post, my friend Pamela Hunt reached out and “tagged” me for a blog tour all about the thing I was having a really hard time doing that day: writing. That’s how things have worked with Pamela from the outset. She is a generous champion of my work who has … Read More
Voice: Lost and Found
Hello again. It’s me. I’ve gone missing since early February, at least from this page. Those who’ve been blogging much longer than I have already know what I’ve discovered: use that voice or lose it. For a host of very good but also not very good reasons, I’ve not written here for the past five weeks or so. I’ve missed … Read More
Hitting Bottom and Calling it Home
Thirty one years ago, Jim Mastro applied for a job as a seal trainer at the San Diego Zoo. He didn’t get it so he went to work in Antarctica. For a year. When I met Jim earlier this year at the Southern California Writer’s Conference, I knew none of this. If I had, I would have abandoned what I … Read More